My year, live from this pandemic, in words, would have to be these lyrics from Shabazz Palace’s 2011 song (which sounds more timely and pertinent than ever) “Are You…Can You…Were You? (Felt)” from their futuristic and speculative but deeply introspective album Black Up. It’s the “relax inside my blueness” for me. It’s also the “I can’t explain it with verbs, I have to do it” for me, too. I’ve been looking towards surrealism, speculative ways of thinking, and jazz to feel less anxious, to feel more human....

Many Americans are extremely reluctant to talk publicly about race, a topic made all the more inflammatory by the lack of honest conversation. Race is the elephant in the room we wish would disappear, even when—or sometimes, perhaps, because—the media are saturated with harrowing stories about hate crimes, civil rights violations, education inequities, voter disenfranchisement, redlining, gentrification, and racial profiling by law enforcement. In addressing the last of these issues in the new Showtime documentary 16 Shots, about the October 2014 murder of Chicago west-side Black teenager Laquan McDonald and the trial of his killer, white Chicago Police Department officer and Hinsdale native Jason Van Dyke, writer-director Rick Rowley pulls back the curtain on an institution noted for closing ranks....

In one scene from the 2019 documentary Dusty Groove: The Sound of Transition, Rick Wojcik sifts through a record collection in the Pill Hill basement of Grady Johnson, a jazz saxophonist and one of Chicago’s first Black pharmacists. Wojcik owns the record store after which the film is named, and he frequents such spaces in the course of his job—much of his inventory consists of the jazz, R&B, and hip-hop albums he finds there....

Concerts are back, baby! Well, they’re back at some venues, with limited capacity and social distancing enforced. OK, we haven’t actually returned to Before Times status yet, but in-person shows are slowly ramping up for those who can risk attending. This week’s gig poster advertises two upcoming concerts at Reggies’ (on the Bananna’s Comedy Shack stage) by Las Vegas-based rockabilly band the Delta Bombers. The art and design are by Jason Lonon of Greensboro, North Carolina, who’s been making posters, banners, logos, and other art for bands, car shows, and burlesque events (often with rockabilly or retro rock ‘n’ roll connections) under the name Death-Ray Design since 2003....

Chicago loves the murals of Sandra Antongiorgi and Marcus Akinlana. The mural, which covered about 2,000 square feet and had been carefully restored by Antongiorgi in 2010 with funding from the community development organization Archi-Treasures, was completely wiped out—apparently speedily and without consultation with anyone who might care. Neither the artists nor the aldermen were contacted (its 200-foot span bridged the 26th and 35th Wards). “It was such an aggressive act,” Antongiorgi says....

Set in contemporary America and based in part on real-life events, Gustavo Ott’s play, the winner of the 2016 Hispanic Playwriting Competition of Chicago, doesn’t have a single protagonist. Instead, Ott has crafted a one-act, performed in Spanish with English overtitles, with an ensemble of more or less equally important characters—a cop, a lawyer, a school-bus driver, an immigrant from Lebanon, another from Mexico, a pair of rebellious teens—who are all survivors of violence....

If you want to put an instant stamp of credibility on your new French restaurant, you sign on Roland Liccioni. Maybe I wouldn’t be so picky about this sandwich if it weren’t for the grating uptempo EDM the joint was blasting to ensure everyone a chill lunch break. I gobbled the thing down just so I could get the hell out. I understand the impulse to turn tables, but it’s pretty much a turnoff....

The Hideout has hired art-pop mastermind and Sooper Records co-owner Sen Morimoto as its new talent buyer. He replaces Sullivan Davis, who began training him last week. “The Hideout’s got such a great legacy, and people really love what it’s about and stands for, and I hope I can maintain that reputation,” Morimoto says. He appeared on the radar of Hideout co-owners Tim and Katie Tuten early this month, and they quickly hired him....

Like millions of Americans, I’ve felt sadness and heartache (and plenty of other emotions) since the lethal coup attempt at the Capitol on January 6. Not only has the Trump administration let the COVID-19 pandemic rampage through the country (at the time of this writing it was killing more than 4,000 Americans per day), but it’s also turned a blind eye to the surge of white supremacist activity that it’s enabled for years....

JustIce icecoldjustice.com If you think ice doesn’t make a difference in a cocktail then you haven’t been to any of the 50-some bars that buy rocks from husband-and-wife duo Rosanna Lloyd and Kimpton Hotels’ manager of bar education, Mike Ryan. Available in several varieties—cubes, blocks, globes, and custom shapes—it’s so diamond clear you can read a book through it. With the help of five Clinebell ice-block makers and a bandsaw, they’re carving up some two and a half tons of ice for bars and bar-restaurants like Lost Lake, Sable, and Drumbar....

Lili K. lilikmusic.com Runner-Up: Patricia Barber

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, at least 130,000 people left Puerto Rico to live elsewhere. Yet in February 2018, Puerto Rican musicians Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo del Valle, aka experimental dream-pop duo Buscabulla (“Troublemaker” in English), returned to the island after nearly a decade in New York City. During those years, they’d become known for their music, which layers minimalist, electro-tropical grooves with high-pitched, ethereal vocals, but despite this success Berrios felt “incomplete” in New York....

Thirty minutes after I left “About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art” at Wrightwood 659, my husband and I had to take a last-minute flight to Oakland to be with his father, whose health had rapidly declined. We ran home and stuffed the last of our clean clothes into a bag. We booked one-way plane tickets from the back of a cab, breathlessly gunning for Midway in near silence. It was the kind of situation that put art, journalism, criticism, all of my bullshit on the back burner....

ARTIST: Kelly Quillin SHOW: Gold Dime, Ono, and Desert Liminal at the Hideout on Wed 10/16 MORE INFO: kellyquillin.bigcartel.com

Gossip Wolf has been missing the heck out of local live-music game show Shame That Tune since it went “off the air” with a good-bye episode at the Hideout last summer—so we’re stoked to report that former STT cohost and Baby Teeth front man Abraham Levitan has a brand-new music-related podcast! For Nerds on Tour the dependably hilarious Levitan talks to folks who’ve “endured in this nutty industry” (as he puts it) about how to do the same—including alt-­country belter Kelly Hogan and New Yorker critic John Seabrook....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, August 12, 2016. CPS security guard allegedly handcuffed a six-year-old for stealing candy A six-year-old girl was allegedly handcuffed by a Chicago Public Schools security guard at far-south-side Fernwood Elementary School for stealing a piece of candy. The girl’s mother, who’s planning to sue CPS, says that her daughter was also left alone by the building’s boilers for more than an hour....

Nhu Lan 2612 W. Lawrence 773-878-9898 nhulanchicago.com Runner-Up: Ba Le

Smart Bar Runner-Up: Berlin

Millennium Park Maggie Daley Park Finalist: Grant Park

Midwestern emo cornerstone Bob Nanna made his bones working guarded feelings into nervy posthardcore with anthemic ambitions. Nanna started his streak in the early 90s with teenage band Friction, and by the end of the decade he’d established himself as scene royalty, fronting Braid and then Hey Mercedes. He also took up writing solo material in 1997, and in the mid-2000s he began issuing it as City on Film. As prolific as he’s been, only now is he finally releasing music under his given name....